On average, only older men really contribute to society

[Legbiter]

So the graph is really saying that workers make a net positive fiscal contribution to the state whereas their dependents do not, this is not a stunning insight.

Yes but this is a hatefact to the progessive Left since that generally means women, except maybe the spinster career types, are dependents, economically speaking.

[Hamilcar]

So the graph is really saying that workers make a net positive fiscal contribution to the state whereas their dependents do not, this is not a stunning insight.

Yes but this is a hatefact to the progessive Left since that generally means women, except maybe the spinster career types, are dependents, economically speaking.

The real problem is that you can barely mention such research in the public square these days. Merely raising the data would get me shunned in many circles. Hooray for anonymous internet forums?

[DGuller]

Positive impact in taxes? Society is not the government.

I was going to say that.  You can have a Wall Street robber baron paying plenty of taxes (though not as much as he should be due to carried interest loophole), and yet still do plenty of damage to the economy and livelihood of other people.

[garbon]

Our trolls have taken a strange stance in this thread.

[Legbiter]

The real problem is that you can barely mention such research in the public square these days. Merely raising the data would get me shunned in many circles. Hooray for anonymous internet forums?

Nothing better than a good shitpost after a long, stifling day. 

[Valmy]

Our trolls have taken a strange stance in this thread.

Yeah I don't understand. Progressives will often bring up statistics showing women make less money.

[Sheilbh]

And will point out that it's women who normally have to sacrifice their careers when they have children so we either need a change in social attitudes or far more affordable childcare  to correct that.

[Hamilcar]

The real problem is that you can barely mention such research in the public square these days. Merely raising the data would get me shunned in many circles. Hooray for anonymous internet forums?

Nothing better than a good shitpost after a long, stifling day. 

The oppression in Iceland must be monumental.

[derspiess]

And will point out that it's women who normally have want to sacrifice their careers when they have children

Fixed.

[Legbiter]

The oppression in Iceland must be monumental.

[garbon]

And will point out that it's women who normally have to sacrifice their careers when they have children so we either need a change in social attitudes or far more affordable childcare  to correct that.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-women-are-no-longer-catching-up-to-men-on-pay/

Why, 538 was on about this topic just today!

Why Women Are No Longer Catching Up To Men On Pay

If you were an American man working full-time in 1984, you earned, on average, a bit more than $22 an hour (adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars). If you were particularly ambitious, or particularly in need of cash, you could make more money by working more hours, but on a per-hour basis, you'd still be making about the same — a bit more than $22 per hour.

Fast-forward to 2015, though, and the picture looks a lot different. The average man working a typical full-time job, 35 to 49 hours a week, now earns about $26 an hour. But the man working 50 hours a week or more now earns close to $33 an hour. Hourly pay has risen more than twice as fast over the past three decades for men working long hours, as employers increasingly reward employees willing to work extra hours with raises or promotions. (The pattern crosses educational and industry lines, and holds when excluding overtime pay.)

Notice that I said "men." Men make up a bit more than half the full-time workforce, but they account for more than 70 percent of those working 50 hours a week or more. So as wage gains have gone disproportionately to people working long hours, they have also gone disproportionately to men, widening the earnings divide between men and women overall.

The gender wage gap has narrowed significantly over the past 50 years. In 1964, according to data from the Census Bureau, the typical woman working full time made about 59 cents on the dollar earned by a man; by 2004, that had risen to 77 cents. (These calculations don't take into account differences in experience, industry or other factors.) More recently, however, progress for women has nearly stalled out: In 2014, the latest data available, women earned 79 cents for every dollar earned by men, a 2-pennies-an-hour improvement over a decade.

Other measures of women's progress in the workforce — their rate of employment, the likelihood that they will work in a historically male-dominated field, the rate at which they run big companies — show a similar pattern of what researchers Martha J. Bailey and Thomas A. DiPrete, in a new essay, call "five decades of remarkable but slowing change" for American women.



Bailey and DiPrete's essay serves as the introduction to a remarkable new collection of papers from the Russell Sage Foundation that examines the progress that women have — and haven't — made over the past half-century. It isn't a simple story. The U.S. has already made major, albeit incomplete, progress on many of the most obvious causes of gender inequality — explicit discrimination on pay,3 overt barriers to employment, taboos against working while raising children. What is left is a tangle of cultural norms, implicit biases, individual preferences and other, subtler forms of discrimination that are much harder to change or even to measure.

Take the long-hours anecdote I described above. The rapid rise in pay for people working long hours has played a major role in the persistence of the overall gender wage gap, particularly for parents; new research in the Russell Sage Foundation volume estimates that the wage gap between mothers and fathers would be 15 percent smaller if the extra-hours increase hadn't occurred. But that premium itself isn't the result of discrimination, explicit or implicit; women who work long hours have seen even faster gains than men (although they still earn less on average).

Rather, the trend contributes to the wage gap because men are so much more likely than women to work those long hours. That, in turn, is the result of a confluence of factors that are deeply embedded in the American economy and society: Women, on average, spend much more time than men on housework, while men — especially a certain category of highly educated, elite men — are expected to work as much as possible. And of course, most importantly, mothers are still far more likely than fathers to be the primary caregiver for their children. Government policies could make a difference — affordable child care, for example, could make it easier for women who want to work long hours to do so — but they can only go so far.



The Russell Sage Foundation papers are full of such thorny issues. A rising share of the gender wage gap is driven by "pre-market" factors such as choice of industry and occupation; those issues can also be the result of explicit or implicit discrimination but are much harder to address than wage differentials within a given job. And even forces that should help close the gap, such as education, have proved insufficient: Women have for decades been more likely to attend college than men — there are now for the first time more female than male college graduates — yet the pay gap is widest among the most educated workers. Girls now outperform boys in many science and math subjects in high school, but women are still much less likely than men to work in many of the most lucrative technical fields; women have actually lost ground to men in computer science in recent decades. And the overall rate of "occupational desegregation" — women entering traditionally male-dominated fields and vice versa — has slowed.

There are some encouraging signs for women. Those who do go into science and technology fields earn nearly as much as equally experienced men (though that isn't true in computer science), suggesting the overall wage gap would narrow if more women entered so-called STEM fields. Moreover, the "motherhood penalty" — the relative decline in wages for women when they have children — has disappeared or even reversed for highly paid, highly educated women, perhaps because they are the most likely to have access to (and be able to afford) child care. That suggests that making child care more widely available could help narrow the gender pay gap for less-educated women, too — something that is looking more likely now that both major presidential candidates are advocating affordable-child-care plans. Culture is changing, too: Men are taking on a larger share of child-rearing responsibilities, though the division is still far from equal.

Still, the overall picture painted by the Russell Sage Foundation research is one of slow, grinding and unsteady progress, and of barriers that are hard to define and even harder to resolve. Hillary Clinton may be poised to crack the ultimate glass ceiling, but true gender equality remains a long way off.

[Richard Hakluyt]

So the graph is really saying that workers make a net positive fiscal contribution to the state whereas their dependents do not, this is not a stunning insight.

Yes but this is a hatefact to the progessive Left since that generally means women, except maybe the spinster career types, are dependents, economically speaking.

I see that but it one of the reasons why I don't get on too well with the "progressive left". To me it is clear that around half the work is performed outside the formal economic sector, most of it by women. As sexual equality becomes a reality we can expect the percentages to change (perhaps, many women may have a genuine preference for work within the household structure); until then it seems strange to insist that they do an equal amount of paid employment as well as the majority of the informal work.

[The Minsky Moment]

So the graph is really saying that workers make a net positive fiscal contribution to the state whereas their dependents do not, this is not a stunning insight.

Yes but this is a hatefact to the progessive Left since that generally means women, except maybe the spinster career types, are dependents, economically speaking.

It's more like a foundational fact for radical feminism which argues that the structure of society inherently reduces women to dependence.

[Valmy]

Eh I know I am dependent on several people to make my life work. Just because you are making the money doesn't mean you don't heavily depend on people. I think only a tiny minority of people are truly rocks and islands. Like Simon and Garfunkel.

I mean by its very nature society makes us dependent. If we weren't there would be no society.

[derspiess]

Women just need to pay their fair share in taxes